In this vision of the future, popular actor Aga Muhlach is the aging President, the Eraserheads are on a Reunion Tour that spans the stars, and Philippine Spacelines is offering a 50% discount on Moon Travel. We follow the musings of a young man as he journeys through the city, headed for the Grand Liwayway Station, where he plans to take the cheapest train out, since they just opened the Tagaytay Ocean Tunnel connecting to Cebu. All the while, he is composing a missive addressed to his love, who is living on a faraway Orbital Space Station.(from wikipedia.org)

    Drawing from anthropology, history, contemporary events, popular culture, and the author’s field experiences and travels, the essays draw connections between nature and culture, self and society, the local and the global, as well as the past and the present in order to arrive at a deeper, fuller, critical, yet hopeful view of a country that is larger than many imagine it to be.Published in 2020.

    "Of our journalists, one of the most able in the new style is Jose F. Lacaba. As TV and newsreel do, he puts you right on the scene... [H]e communicates the emotion, even the meaning of what's happening without having to spell it out." - Quijano de Manila

    But a physician’s incorrect diagnosis will always be a matter of life and death. Dr. Baticulon’s dispatches from the country’s leading public hospital are told in language that requires no further acrobatics. How do you tell a mother that the smiling ten-year-old boy in her arms will not survive the following week? How do you tell a little girl she’ll never be able to go home to play because her parents can’t afford P54,000 for her surgery? How do you live with yourself after breaking a promise to save an eight-year-old boy’s life? Like the trenches of war zones, the operating room is the frontline of life’s most difficult questions. Here are a neurosurgeon’s gripping ruminations on hope and loss."—Lourd De Veyra"Ronnie Baticulon follows in the footsteps of many other physicians for whom the task of understanding and healing humanity did not stop at the clinic or the operating room. They used words and language not only for their patients but also for themselves—a long and distinguished line from Rabelais, Chekhov, and Maugham to Michael Crichton, Richard Selzer, Oliver Sacks, and of course our own Jose Rizal and Arturo Rotor. Dr. Baticulon is a worthy addition to that tradition."—Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.

    More than the individual story of a mother watching her sons grow and plunge into real life, Dekada '70 is an indictment of martial law, and here, Lualhati minces no worlds." - Female Forum, November 21, 1983

    His two-year-old blog This is a Crazy Planets has gained a large following on SPOT.ph, and his best works are now compiled in a book of the same title. With Lourd's various entries on everyday life's absurdities, This is a Crazy Planets mirrors Filipino pop culture in a way that is both humorous and endearing. "Lourd is able to say what we're dying to say, but can't-or can't articulate well enough," says Sison.

    However, since all of the letters referenced in the film did exist, we decided to publish this gorgeous keepsake ourselves.Love Letters of Great Men follows hot on the heels of the film and collects together some of history's most romantic letters from the private papers of Beethoven, Mark Twain, Mozart, and Lord Byron. For some of these great men, love is a delicious poison (William Congreve); for others, a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music (Charles Darwin). Love can scorch like the heat of the sun (Henry VIII), or penetrate the depths of one's heart like a cooling rain (Flaubert). Every shade of love is here, from the exquisite eloquence of Oscar Wilde and the simple devotion of Robert Browning, to the wonderfully modern misery of the Roman Pliny the Younger, losing himself in work to forget how much he misses his beloved wife, Calpurnia.Taken together, these letters show that perhaps men haven't changed all that much over the last 2,000 years--passion, jealousy, hope and longing still rule their hearts and minds. In an age of e-mail and texted i luv us, this timeless and unique collection reminds us that nothing can compare to the simple joy of sitting down to read a letter from the one you love.

    Richly imagined, gloriously written, Banana Heart Summer is an incandescent tale of food, family, and longing—at once a love letter to mothers and daughters and a lively celebration of friendship and community. Twelve-year-old Nenita is hungry for everything: food, love, life. Growing up with five sisters and brothers, she searches for happiness in the magical smell of the deep-frying bananas of Nana Dora, who first tells Nenita the myth of the banana heart; in the tantalizing scent of Manolito, the heartthrob of Nenita and her friends; in the pungent aromas of the dishes she prepares for the most beautiful woman on Remedios Street. To Nenita, food is synonymous with love—the love she yearns to receive from her disappointed mother. But in this summer of broken hearts, new friendships, secrets, and discoveries, change will be as sudden and explosive as the monsoon that marks the end of the sweltering heat—and transforms Nenita’s young life in ways she could never imagine.

    These are stories that passed down through the ages virtually unaltered in their telling. To those who told and listened to them, they expressed something fundamental about Irish culture and the Irish way of life. The stories in this volume feature a wide variety of fantastic beings, including ghosts, witches, fairies, and changelings, but several feature creatures that are virtually exclusive to Ireland: the banshee, the merrow, the pooka, and the leprechaun. Read these tales of frightening supernatural horrors, brave folk heroes, and everyday people clever enough to outwith the devil, and you'll agree that they could only take place on Irish soil.

    Here are Buster, the kitten who arrived on Christmas; Alfred, the cat at the sweet shop; little Emily, who lived with the gentleman tramp; and Olly and Ginny, the kittens who charmed readers when they first appeared at the Herriots' house in the worldwide bestseller Every Living Thing. And along with these come others, each story as memorable and heartwarming as the last, each told with that magical blend of gentle wit and human compassion that marks every word from James Herriot's pen.

    As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar.Now translated into thirty languages, Einstein’s Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians, and painters all over the world. In poetic vignettes, it explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.

    In this collection, Hidalgo returns to the writing of the realistic short story while remaining true to the style of the travel essays, which some critics believe to be her most inspired work.

    V. M. Gonzalez has influenced an entire generation of young Philippine writers and has also acquired a devoted international readership. His books, however, are not widely available in this country. The Bread of Salt and Other Stories provides a retrospective selection of sixteen of his short stories (all originally written in English), arranged in order of their writing, from the early 1950s to the present day.This is a powerful collection, both for the unity and universality of the author's subjects and themes and for the distinctive character of his prose style. As Gonzalez remarks in his Preface: "In tone and subject matter, [these stories] might suggest coming full circle - in the learning of one's craft, in finding a language and, finally, in discovering a country of one's own."Gonzalez has traveled widely and has taught the writer's craft in various countries. Nonetheless, his primary metaphor is his colonial island homeland, and his stories are peopled with the farmers and fishermen, the schoolteachers and small-town merchants, "the underclass who constitute the majority in all societies." He portrays, in the men, women, and children of the peasantry, an ordinary and enduring people who live lives of stark dignity against a backdrop of forgotten and unknown gods. A broad humanity suggests itself: "This feeling of having emerged out of a void, or something close to it, is not uncommon, and we face our respective futures predisposed, by an innocence, to prayer and hope."Colonization, Gonzalez feels, has created in Filipinos "a truly submerged people." The stories in The Bread of Salt explore this rich vein at several levels, from the river-crossed wilderness of the kaingin farmers, stoic in the hard face of nature; to the commercial centers of the town dwellers, cut off from the mythic animism of the land; to the America of the contemporary sojourner, exiled from the old ways without the guidance of new traditions. Gonzalez writes: "It was in America that I began to recognize my involvement in the process of becoming a new person . . . of trying to shed my skin as a colonial."Gonzalez's social commentary is implicit throughout his stories. His message is humane, moral, tellingly accurate, and gently ironic; he is neither sentimental nor doctrinaire. His narratives are presented without intrusive explanation, invoking instead the reader's own powers of contemplation and discovery. His strong prose style, spare yet lyrical suggests the cadences of Philippine oral narrative traditions.Each of these sixteen tales is a small masterpiece. The language and its imagery, the characters and their aspirations, all connect powerfully with the reader and serve to illuminate the dreams of exiles and colonials, suggesting what it was like, as a Filipino, to witness the endless interacting of cultures.

    Kennedy, Groucho Marx, Charles Dickens, Katharine Hepburn, Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Clementine Churchill, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and many more.

    Santos has presented what may well be the essence of those years - the loneliness and hunger of a people who were almost all of them hurt and broken to the bone. But for an ideal, which Santos so eloquently dramatizes in this book, they would have lost their very souls. In this sense YOU LOVELY PEOPLE is a document and at once a portrait of the Filipino heart.